Heads up, Mayors – it’s been brought to our attention that there’s been some confusion regarding the bug-reporting policy in the EA beta test agreement for SimCity.

Don’t worry – EA has never taken away access to a player’s games for failing to report a bug. In fact, we’re in the process of updating our agreement to make this point clear before the beta starts this Friday. If you have any more questions, read our FAQ: http://bit.ly/UCpuAA

Hope to see you in the beta Friday!

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Panickd wrote on Jan 23, 2013, 18:19:Just because a developer has designed a game to operate in a way that you don't like doesn't mean that game is broken or in need of being "fixed". No one looks at a game designed to be an MMORPG (Elder Scrolls Online, anyone?) and says, "Always online? Fuck that shit! Remember when you used to be able to play RPGs by yourself? Ah the good old days!"

If you want to play SimCity by yourself SimCity 4 still works (as does SimCity 3000 and SimCity 2000, and hell, even the original with a bit of DOSbox hacking). This SimCity was designed to be played online. If you don't like it, don't buy it and don't play it.

They didn't design it to work with an internet connection, they required it to have an internet connection. There is a difference there, very little of the functionality in the game needs a persistent connection. In fact as far as I can tell none of it does. You don't need a persistent connection for leaderboards and you don't put things like AI on the server side when there is no benefit to doing so and then excuse that as a feature. Those were business decisions related to EA publishing the game, not design features. I would rather see a genuinely new and interesting SimCity game than just replaying my old library to death because I'm a big fan of the series.

So maybe for you as its as easy to say dont buy it then but some of us are pretty torn about these things because we really like the games. I probably won't buy it unless they change it but on the off chance it might make a difference I'll talk about it too.

It actually is as easy as saying, "if you don't like it don't buy it". That's how companies take notice of whether people are happy with what they are doing. People went through the same thing with Diablo III with some die hard fans absolutely bombing the Blizzard forums with how it sucked that it was always online and they would never buy another Blizzard game and what happened? Diablo III was the fastest selling PC game ever and is currently the fifth best selling PC game of all time. I doubt that could have happened if everyone who was pissing and moaning about it didn't buy it.

And you assume an awful lot about the design of this game without being privy to the developers thoughts. I'll grant you it could be that they are designing the game this way to pad the bottom line with microtransactions, but that's pretty cynical. It could also be that they genuinely wanted to try and come up with a way for people to play together and interact in a SimCity game that came down to more than sharing downloadable city layouts online and it was always planned as an online game whether it "needed" to be or not.

I am a huge fan of the series too. I played the original on a C64 and the SNES version was one of the first games I bought for that console. But I'm not going to sit around and bitch vehemently over a game I've never played. I would rather give the developers the benefit of the doubt and see what new ideas they can come up with. And if it turns out to be crap, I'll bitch about it then.